Schumer Wants Bus Safety Grades Posted on Windshields

Image

Firefighters at the scene of the fatal bus crash in Queens last month. Senator Chuck Schumer said he wants bus operators to post restaurant-style letter grades on vehicle windshields.CreditYeong-Ung Yang for The New York Times

A federal law requiring bus companies to post safety ratings where passengers can see them might have prevented a deadly bus crash in Queens last month, Senator Chuck Schumer said, if riders had known where to look for the evaluations.

Mr. Schumer, a New York Democrat, said Sunday that he wants to strengthen that law, which he helped pass in 2012, by amending it to require bus operators to post restaurant-style letter grades on their vehicles’ windshields.

“While there are safety grades when someone gets on a bus, they have no idea what they are,” Mr. Schumer said at a news conference at the Roosevelt Island Tramway plaza, along a stretch of Second Avenue at 59th Street where heavy traffic, including charter and tour buses, rumbled by. “They are required to be posted on the websites, but they are posted in such a small, hidden way no one sees them.”

Since 2012, bus companies have received one of three safety ratings — satisfactory, conditional and unsatisfactory — from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, a division of the Department of Transportation.

Mr. Schumer wants those ratings converted to letter grades — A, B and C — and the grades posted on bus windshields. Mr. Schumer displayed a mock-up of what the grades might look like, noting their similarity to the grades required by New York City in the windows of bars and restaurants, a system Mr. Schumer praised as a success.

“We need this change,” Mr. Schumer said. “The law is on the books, but the federal D.O.T. has not enforced it in an appropriate way. We need them to do that, and do that now, and it could go a long way to preventing the kind of horrible crash we saw in Queens.”

Around 6:15 a.m. on Sept. 18, at the start of the Monday morning rush, a charter bus operated by the Queens-based Dahlia Group ran a red light at the intersection of Main Street and Northern Boulevard and struck a city bus. The collision killed the Dahlia driver, Raymond D. Mong, and two others, and injured 16 people. The charter bus was traveling at 58 miles per hour — nearly twice the speed limit — at the time of the crash.

Mr. Mong, it was later learned, had been fired in 2015 as a bus driver for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority after an accident in which a sedan he was driving crashed into two cars on Interstate 95 in New Haven and he fled the scene. He received a suspended jail sentence and was placed on probation after being convicted of driving under the influence and evading arrest.

Dahlia, Mr. Schumer said, “had a terrible safety record — 11 violations — and the driver, this driver who caused these deaths, had been previously fired from the M.T.A. because of a D.U.I.”

“But the passengers who got on the bus had no idea Dahlia was not a safe company,” he said. “That’s the tragedy of this.”

Last year, a Dahlia bus operated by another company, VMC East Coast, overturned during snowy weather en route to a Connecticut casino, injuring 30 people. In the last two years, Dahlia buses have been ticketed for speeding at least four times, including two instances when one of its buses was exceeding the speed limit by at least 15 miles per hour, according to federal records, which also ranks Dahlia in the bottom 20 percent on unsafe driving.

For all that, as of Sunday, Dahlia still rates as “satisfactory” for safety on the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration website — the equivalent of an “A” under the grading system Mr. Schumer proposes.

Still, Mr. Schumer speculated that had the letter-grading system already been in place for a while, “Dahlia would have had no choice but to be far more careful. They might not have hired a bus driver who had had a previous D.U.I. conviction.”

Jeremy Walker, whose Massachusetts-based bus company, Yep Tour, has paid a six-figure fine as part of its battle with New York City officials over permits and routes, said on Sunday that he agreed with Mr. Schumer that bus company safety is an issue in need of attention. But Mr. Walker doubted that a letter-grade system would alter passenger choices, which he said are based primarily on ticket price.

“To just give someone an A, B, C, does he really think that’s going to change people riding?” he said.

Mr. Walker also criticized the underlying ratings. “The problem is those grades don’t specifically tell the complete truth,” he said. “It’s like a two-year review, and if a company makes changes, nobody’s going to know that” until the next ratings are issued, he said.

On Sunday, Mr. Schumer also said that many operators have no violations, and that highly visible letter grades would prompt passengers to use the safer carriers while forcing the unsafe ones to improve.